Чарльз Диккенс
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.
‘Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,’ said Mr. Crisparkle. ‘You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.’
‘Pray do not leave us yet,’ Helena implored him. ‘Another minute.’
‘I should not,’ said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, ‘have needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me, Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and true. O, if in my childhood I had known such a guide!’
‘Follow your guide now, Neville,’ murmured Helena, ‘and follow him to Heaven!’
There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or it would have repudiated her exaltation of him. As it was, he laid a finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother.
‘To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!’ Thus Neville, greatly moved. ‘I beg your forgiveness for my miserable lapse into a burst of passion.’
‘Not mine, Neville, not mine. You know with whom forgiveness lies, as the highest attribute conceivable. Miss Helena, you and your brother are twin children. You came into this world with the same dispositions, and you passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse circumstances. What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome in him? You see the rock that lies in his course. Who but you can keep him clear of it?’
‘Who but you, sir?’ replied Helena. ‘What is my influence, or my weak wisdom, compared with yours!’
‘You have the wisdom of Love,’ returned the Minor Canon, ‘and it was the highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember. As to mine – but the less said of that commonplace commodity the better. Good night!’
She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently raised it to her lips.
‘Tut!’ said the Minor Canon softly, ‘I am much overpaid!’ and turned away.
Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be done. ‘I shall probably be asked to marry them,’ he reflected, ‘and I would they were married and gone! But this presses first.’
He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or whether he should speak to Jasper. The consciousness of being popular with the whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it. ‘I will strike while the iron is hot,’ he said, ‘and see him now.’
Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr. Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in. Long afterwards he had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: ‘What is the matter? Who did it?’
‘It is only I, Jasper. I am sorry to have disturbed you.’
The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.
‘I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an indigestive after-dinner sleep. Not to mention that you are always welcome.’
‘Thank you. I am not confident,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, ‘that my subject will at first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace, and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace. In a word, Jasper, I want to establish peace between these two young fellows.’
A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.
‘How?’ was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.
‘For the “How” I come to you. I want to ask you to do me the great favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note, in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands. I know what a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him. And without in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was bitterly stung.’
Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire. Mr. Crisparkle continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before, inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close internal calculation.
‘I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,’ the Minor Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:
‘You have cause to say so. I am not, indeed.’
‘Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I hope he and I will get the better of it between us. But I have exacted a very solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.’
‘You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle. Do you really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?’
‘I do.’
The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.
‘Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,’ said Jasper; ‘I will do it.’
Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.
‘I will do it,’ repeated Jasper, ‘for the comfort of having your guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears. You will laugh – but do you keep a Diary?’
‘A line for a day; not more.’
‘A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would need, Heaven knows,’ said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, ‘but that my Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too. You will laugh at this entry; you will guess when it was made:
‘“Past midnight. – After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy, that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against. All my efforts are vain. The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless, his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of its object, appal me. So profound is the impression, that twice since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.”
‘Here is another entry next morning:
‘“Ned up and away. Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever. He laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as Neville Landless any day. I told him that might be, but he was not as bad a man. He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly. I am unable to shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil – if feelings founded upon staring facts are to be so called.”
‘Again and again,’ said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the book before putting it by, ‘I have relapsed into these moods, as other entries show. But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.’
‘Such an antidote, I hope,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, ‘as will induce you before long to consign the black humours to the flames. I ought to be the last to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your nephew has made you exaggerative here.’
‘You are my witness,’ said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘what my state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and in what words I expressed it. You remember objecting to a word I used, as being too strong? It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.’
‘Well, well. Try the antidote,’ rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; ‘and may it give you a brighter and better view of the case! We will discuss it no more now. I have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.’
‘You shall find,’ said Jasper, as they shook hands, ‘that I will not do the thing you wish me to do, by halves. I will take care that Ned, giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.’
On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle with the following letter:
‘My dear Jack,
‘I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. Crisparkle, whom I much respect and esteem. At once I openly say that I forgot myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did, and that I wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.
‘Look here, dear old boy. Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let there be only we three, and let us shake hands all round there and then, and say no more about it.
‘My dear Jack,‘Ever your most affectionate,‘Edwin Drood.
‘P.S. Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.’
‘You expect Mr. Neville, then?’ said Mr. Crisparkle.
‘I count upon his coming,’ said Mr. Jasper.
CHAPTER XI – A PICTURE AND A RING
Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn. It is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. It is one of those nooks where a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one another, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden-mould and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to their tiny understandings. Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not.
In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the property of us Britons: the odd fortune of which sacred institution it is to be in exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for, and boasted of, whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world: in those days no neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow Staple Inn. The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the south-west wind blew into it unimpeded.
Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one December afternoon towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and candles shed murky and blurred rays through the windows of all its then-occupied sets of chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the mysterious inscription:
In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about the inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing up at it, that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire.
Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he had ever known ambition or disappointment? He had been bred to the Bar, and had laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds; ‘convey the wise it call,’ as Pistol says. But Conveyancing and he had made such a very indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent – if there can be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.
No. Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious. She was wooed, not won, and they went their several ways. But an Arbitration being blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great credit in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable to its source. So, by chance, he had found his niche. Receiver and Agent now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry vine and fig-tree of P. J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven.
Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, and several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room. They can scarcely be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was their orderly arrangement. The apprehension of dying suddenly, and leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day. The largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man. There are sorts of life-blood that course more quickly, more gaily, more attractively; but there is no better sort in circulation.
There was no luxury in his room. Even its comforts were limited to its being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded fireside. What may be called its private life was confined to the hearth, and all easy-chair, and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the rug after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise remained turned up like a shining mahogany shield. Behind it, when standing thus on the defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink. An outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping-room was across the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of the common stair. Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it should become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date seventeen-forty-seven.
As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by his fire. A pale, puffy-faced, dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of some strange power over Mr. Grewgious. As though he had been called into existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed when required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool, although Mr. Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have been advanced by dispossessing him. A gloomy person with tangled locks, and a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with unaccountable consideration.
‘Now, Bazzard,’ said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk: looking up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: ‘what is in the wind besides fog?’
‘Mr. Drood,’ said Bazzard.
‘What of him?’
‘Has called,’ said Bazzard.
‘You might have shown him in.’
‘I am doing it,’ said Bazzard.
The visitor came in accordingly.
‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles. ‘I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone. How do you do, Mr. Edwin? Dear me, you’re choking!’
‘It’s this fog,’ returned Edwin; ‘and it makes my eyes smart, like Cayenne pepper.’
‘Is it really so bad as that? Pray undo your wrappers. It’s fortunate I have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.’
‘No I haven’t,’ said Mr. Bazzard at the door.
‘Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without observing it,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘Pray be seated in my chair. No. I beg! Coming out of such an atmosphere, in my chair.’
Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was speedily licked up by the eager fire.
‘I look,’ said Edwin, smiling, ‘as if I had come to stop.’
‘ – By the by,’ cried Mr. Grewgious; ‘excuse my interrupting you; do stop. The fog may clear in an hour or two. We can have dinner in from just across Holborn. You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside; pray stop and dine.’
‘You are very kind,’ said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.
‘Not at all,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘you are very kind to join issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck. And I’ll ask,’ said Mr. Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if inspired with a bright thought: ‘I’ll ask Bazzard. He mightn’t like it else. – Bazzard!’
Bazzard reappeared.
‘Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.’
‘If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,’ was the gloomy answer.
‘Save the man!’ cried Mr. Grewgious. ‘You’re not ordered; you’re invited.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bazzard; ‘in that case I don’t care if I do.’
‘That’s arranged. And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth. For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare – in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.’
These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by rote. Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute them.
‘I was a little delicate, you see,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone, after his clerk’s departure, ‘about employing him in the foraging or commissariat department. Because he mightn’t like it.’
‘He seems to have his own way, sir,’ remarked Edwin.
‘His own way?’ returned Mr. Grewgious. ‘O dear no! Poor fellow, you quite mistake him. If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.’
‘I wonder where he would be!’ Edwin thought. But he only thought it, because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and collected his skirts for easy conversation.
‘I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder – where I can tell you, you are expected – and to offer to execute any little commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a bit in any proceedings? Eh, Mr. Edwin?’
‘I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.’
‘Of attention!’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘Ah! of course, not of impatience?’
‘Impatience, sir?’
Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch – not that he in the remotest degree expressed that meaning – and had brought himself into scarcely supportable proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals. But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.
‘I have lately been down yonder,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his skirts; ‘and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you you are expected.’
‘Indeed, sir! Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.’
‘Do you keep a cat down there?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.
Edwin coloured a little as he explained: ‘I call Rosa Pussy.’
‘O, really,’ said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; ‘that’s very affable.’
Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected to the appellation. But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of a clock.
‘A pet name, sir,’ he explained again.
‘Umps,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod. But with such an extraordinary compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that his visitor was much disconcerted.
‘Did PRosa – ’ Edwin began by way of recovering himself.
‘PRosa?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious.
‘I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind; – did she tell you anything about the Landlesses?’
‘No,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘What is the Landlesses? An estate? A villa? A farm?’
‘A brother and sister. The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become a great friend of P – ’
‘PRosa’s,’ Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.
‘She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?’
‘Neither,’ said Mr. Grewgious. ‘But here is Bazzard.’
Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters – an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him, and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.
It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort, Government. It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the line in the National Gallery.
As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the fog served for its general sauce. To hear the out-door clerks sneezing, wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing Doctor Kitchener’s. To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter shut the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder flavour than Harvey. And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that the leg of this young man, in its application to the door, evinced the finest sense of touch: always preceding himself and tray (with something of an angling air about it), by some seconds: and always lingering after he and the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.
The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade. Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates), and danced out gaily. If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any other year of his period, drank such wines – then, for a certainty, P. J. T. was Pretty Jolly Too.
Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these glowing vintages. Instead of his drinking them, they might have been poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face. Neither was his manner influenced. But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it after very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been seen looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.
‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.
‘I follow you, sir,’ returned Bazzard; who had done his work of consuming meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in speechlessness.
‘I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!’
‘Success to Mr. Bazzard!’ echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: ‘What in, I wonder!’
‘And May!’ pursued Mr. Grewgious – ‘I am not at liberty to be definite – May! – my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I shall not come well out of this – May! – it ought to be put imaginatively, but I have no imagination – May! – the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark as I am likely to get – May it come out at last!’
Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into his tangled locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there; then into his waistcoat, as if it were there; then into his pockets, as if it were there. In all these movements he was closely followed by the eyes of Edwin, as if that young gentleman expected to see the thorn in action. It was not produced, however, and Mr. Bazzard merely said: ‘I follow you, sir, and I thank you.’
‘I am going,’ said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the table with one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, to whisper to Edwin, ‘to drink to my ward. But I put Bazzard first. He mightn’t like it else.’
This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have been a wink, if, in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick enough. So Edwin winked responsively, without the least idea what he meant by doing so.
‘And now,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I devote a bumper to the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa. Bazzard, the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa!’
‘I follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and I pledge you!’
‘And so do I!’ said Edwin.
‘Lord bless me,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence which of course ensued: though why these pauses should come upon us when we have performed any small social rite, not directly inducive of self-examination or mental despondency, who can tell? ‘I am a particularly Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use the word, not having a morsel of fancy), that I could draw a picture of a true lover’s state of mind, to-night.’
‘Let us follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and have the picture.’
‘Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, ‘and will throw in a few touches from the life. I dare say it is wrong in many particulars, and wants many touches from the life, for I was born a Chip, and have neither soft sympathies nor soft experiences. Well! I hazard the guess that the true lover’s mind is completely permeated by the beloved object of his affections. I hazard the guess that her dear name is precious to him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and is preserved sacred. If he has any distinguishing appellation of fondness for her, it is reserved for her, and is not for common ears. A name that it would be a privilege to call her by, being alone with her own bright self, it would be a liberty, a coldness, an insensibility, almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt elsewhere.’
It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with his hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out of himself: much as a charity boy with a very good memory might get his catechism said: and evincing no correspondent emotion whatever, unless in a certain occasional little tingling perceptible at the end of his nose.
‘My picture,’ Mr. Grewgious proceeded, ‘goes on to represent (under correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever impatient to be in the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of his affections; as caring very little for his case in any other society; and as constantly seeking that. If I was to say seeking that, as a bird seeks its nest, I should make an ass of myself, because that would trench upon what I understand to be poetry; and I am so far from trenching upon poetry at any time, that I never, to my knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of it. And I am besides totally unacquainted with the habits of birds, except the birds of Staple Inn, who seek their nests on ledges, and in gutter-pipes and chimneypots, not constructed for them by the beneficent hand of Nature. I beg, therefore, to be understood as foregoing the bird’s-nest. But my picture does represent the true lover as having no existence separable from that of the beloved object of his affections, and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life. And if I do not clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the reason that having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I mean, or that having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to express. Which, to the best of my belief, is not the case.’
Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of this picture came into the light. He now sat looking at the fire, and bit his lip.
‘The speculations of an Angular man,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, still sitting and speaking exactly as before, ‘are probably erroneous on so globular a topic. But I figure to myself (subject, as before, to Mr. Edwin’s correction), that there can be no coolness, no lassitude, no doubt, no indifference, no half fire and half smoke state of mind, in a real lover. Pray am I at all near the mark in my picture?’
As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, he jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have supposed him in the middle of his oration.
‘I should say, sir,’ stammered Edwin, ‘as you refer the question to me – ’
